The consumer costs are significantly lower for software. For example, the cost of ChatGPT is minuscule in comparison, while the R&D costs are still quite high.
The real difference between the two sectors is that for medicine, you have a captive audience. People are willing to give up their life savings for certain medical interventions. That same cannot be said for software.
The other real difference is that the addressable market for most drugs is quite small in terms of number of customers. The vast majority of people just don’t need a particular medicine, especially the life-saving variety. The more niche, the more you have to charge to make up for the large R&D costs.
There are, of course, also instances of gouging. But it’s not like these things should inherently cost $20/mo, or whatever, if you want to be able to pay biomedical researchers enough not to go do something else highly compensated like finance/consulting/whatever. Sadly, I had a lot of classmates in engineering school who went that route instead. We urgently need more nuclear reactors, but one of the smartest guys I know, a nuclear engineer, is doing healthcare private equity.
A lot of saas is more like $200+/mo for businesses, and chatgpt might be $20/mo for consumers, but there are companies paying $1m/mo or more for that api.
The real difference between the two sectors is that for medicine, you have a captive audience. People are willing to give up their life savings for certain medical interventions. That same cannot be said for software.